The Lonely by Ainslie Hogarth

closed my eyes and imagined myself to be as still as one of those drops. Stopped in my tracks, flash frozen. Maybe those little drips were still moving but they were just going so slowly that no one could see. Something small inside of them that still crawls forward, that’s still as alive as I am. And they live their whole lives in that small-moving something.
    Maybe to someone bigger and faster, I’m barely moving. There’s someone watching me, thinking that I’m still as a stalagmite, that I’m a figurine, but I’m not. There is something still alive in me. I began to hear the wet, dripping sounds of a cave echoing through the room. Cold, stagnant, shallow breath. Air like a vacuum, anxious to crack. I should really let Phyllis’s breeze in here. This cavernous air would be cleared out in no time. But I couldn’t move. I was as still as those frozen drips above my head. And before I knew it, I was asleep.
    The next morning, Phyllis knocked on our door.
    â€œBreakfast,” she coughed.
    Julia and I looked at each other solemnly.
    Day one.
    The round breakfast table was covered in a yellow-and-white-checkered tablecloth, pulled tight around the edges and clipped with special pins that looked like mallard ducks. Phyllis’s arms were covered in bracelets and she wore a brown linen shirtdress and a gold belt. She had decorated the table in towers of buttered limp toast and every different kind of jam. There was a pot of coffee percolating on the stove. I was too young yet for that to interest me, but only just. Still at an age in which coffee was just another disgusting odor associated with being a withered, wrung-out adult. The jams though, that was a different story. There were as many jams as keys on a piano.
    â€œI hope you like jam.”
    â€œWe do.”
    Phyllis looked up at me quickly, as though I’d startled her. I took a seat and began inspecting the labels on the jam jars.
    â€œI was wondering, Easter. I want you to do something for me while you’re here. Can you do something for me?”
    â€œProbably.”
    Phyllis took a long gulp from her glass of tomato juice. She let a dark red moustache attach itself to her top lip for just a second before she lapped it off expertly with her snake tongue.
    â€œThere are some items of value down in the basement that I’m ready to part with but I need some help to dig them out of the mess. Do you think you could help?”
    I didn’t want to be the one to make the decision for us. I’d wait for Julia. A long moment passed. Phyllis fiddled with one of the mallard ducks clamped to the edge of the table and I stared at the checked tablecloth for so long that each square began to dance.
    â€œWe’ve got nothing better to do,” Julia finally agreed.
    So I nodded.
    And that’s how we ended up in Phyllis’s basement.

The Cube
    When Phyllis first opened the door, the basement looked like a Magic Eye picture in the Saturday paper. Like we were face-to-face with a wall of matter and only with serious concentration could we see it as an actual space to enter. But nothing ever appeared. Because, truly, the room was so absolutely packed with things that they all fused together, shaped like Play-Doh to almost the exact dimensions of the room.
    It was a brick of Phyllis’s life, tucked away underground, and she wanted us to sever it and save something, work our way through it, a tumor to be biopsied. There was a sliver of space at the very top of the room, about the height of a baseball bat, and sun filtered in from the bits of window that peeked over the top of the mess up there.
    â€œSo, can you get in there and find a few things for me? I have a list.”
    She held out piece of paper torn from a long, yellow legal pad. It said:
    Elizabeth’s chloroform mask
    Elizabeth’s riot gear
    Elizabeth’s Arabian fly net
    Elizabeth’s blindfold hood
    Elizabeth’s spotted body